


Bitter Gulfs

by Ryo Hoshi (Hoshi_Ryo)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Body Horror, Break Up, Ethics, Gore, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Instability, Morality, Multi, Other, Politics, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-28 10:28:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoshi_Ryo/pseuds/Ryo%20Hoshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ship Feferi's Ancestor had sent as a gift in anticipation of her impending adulthood was a double-edged sword, the first move in a delicate political dance between the seasoned ruler and sheltered heiress.</p><p>While gathering together the trolls she hoped would make up the central cadre of her faction was a good next step in the dance, seriously injuring her matesprit in a fit of highblood fury was definitely a misstep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act 1.1. Across the Rotting Sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings:** Body horror. Psychological horror. Gore. Ethical issues regarding if quality of life is more important than being alive, and why sheltered future absolute monarchs simply are not going to be good at them. Ethical issues regarding absolute monarchs  & the rights of others. No warning for PTSD but that's pure technicality until a bit of time has passed. Also, there are improperly attributed quotes.
> 
> At least for this first act, the focus is totally on Feferi and this thing called 'character development.' Canonically she's a bit too much of a generic princess for me to be comfortable writing her—she doesn't get much characterization, period—and some of her fandom is disturbing to me simply because I have severe issues with black-and-white morality... Offhand I think the first may have something to do with having gotten my early moral & ethical teachings from a bonze.
> 
>  **This is rated and intended for mature readers.** If you are not one, either go read something else or fake it.

_I come, old friend, from Hell tonight, across the rotting sea_  
 _Nor the nails of the cross, nor the blood of Christ can bring you hope this eve_  
 _The dead have come to claim a debt from thee_  
 _They stand outside your door fourscore and three_  
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

She only really realized what she had done after, and then the discomfort Karcr... _Karkat_ had always shown with the idea of large caste differences in the flushed quadrant made amber-clear horrifying sense.

Feferi never wanted to reach the sort of calm with a note of _really want to vomit_ again. There was yellow blood everywhere and Eridan being actually angry with her (and oh glub had he had to pull her off?) and...

She could force him to live, she knew that. Drive his body to go ahead and keep going, and...

...She knew she could. She'd granted that gift to trolls with worse (though not _much_ worse) injuries—worse and they'd be dead already and she'd been _good_ and she'd never actually caused the injuries herself, just waited and watched and noticed when some unlucky lowblood got herself cut in half or lost his face and...

If they were injuries that healed, if they didn't kill you, they _did_ heal. She wasn't able to cause regeneration, not of tissues that didn't _naturally_ do it—arms and legs and brains and eyes and lower halves stayed gone, and...

(...and that lowblood had begged to be allowed to die, please, and...and...she hadn't _realized_...)

She'd met Eridan on one of her searches for people to cull, the way she wanted culling to mean. His gills had been slashed and she'd not even really pitied him ( _had_ she ever? she wasn't sure) but she'd wanted to see if gills were something that'd healed if given a chance—seadwellers normally died so quickly from gill injuries, after all—so she'd culled him, kept him alive using her powers and maybe...maybe that was why he'd...

And when you're always clam...calm, no waves moving on the surface, you don't think that _maybe_ you need a moirail just as much as somebody else—but she grew up in the seas and should have _known_ how deceptive calm waters could be but she hadn't and...

There were bits of Sollux _everywhere_.

Mostly blood. More blood than a troll can spare, normally.

But scraps of tissue under her claws, between her teeth.

Karkat was giving frantic orders—Gamzee was sticking close, papping and being a _good_ moirail and _glub_ she felt so horrible right now and...and...

She couldn't ask Eridan to...

She was a horrible person. He'd been so obviously in pity with her, and she'd asked him to please take the burden of killing lusus to feed her lusus ( _her_ responsibility, _not_ his) and he'd done it and she'd thought it was perfectly natural and how fro...friends were and...

...and she wasn't sure now if he'd ever been pale for her, and she always had _known_ he'd thought she had rescued him in a fit of pale pity instead of simple dry curiosity but that had been fine, except...

Except if she'd actually told him the truth, maybe she'd have had a moirail who _could_ calm her down, kept her being carried away by the sudden rogue wave appearing on the smooth too-smooth calm seas of her temper and...

And Sollux wouldn't be all over the glubbing room and she'd not have everybody but Eridan nervous of her now (and she just did not _want_ to ask Eridan to and wasn't _going_ to and she had the horrible feeling that he would let her rip his organs out one by one shred his gills keep him alive undying through all of it and _he still would pity her_ ) and...

...and the thought of risking doing this again to anybody, fro...friend or quadrant, made her feel even more ill.

She was the Heiress. She was free to choose if she filled a pail, or not. It was not suicidal for her to just...

To just _not_.

And...maybe she could ask her friends—the fish and water puns were just _wrong_ horribly wrong, she needed to be serious if she had been maybe Sollux would be fine (or at least not splattered all over the glubbing block) _—_ if there were reforms _they_ wanted.

...but...at least...yes.

Luck still smiled upon her despite everything and she could repair maybe _some_ of the harm she had done.


	2. Act 1.2. The Night-Mare Life-in-Death

_Her lips were red, her looks were free,_  
 _Her locks were yellow as gold:_  
 _Her skin was as white as leprosy,_  
 _The Night-Mare **Life-in-Death** was she,_  
 _Who thicks man's blood with cold._  
—Found in the system logs of the Battleship Condescension

She did her best to ignore the nervous shifts as she got up, feet shaky as if she'd only just traded her tail for legs as if she was freshly pupated wriggler heading to the Trials instead of perigees short of adulthood.

The warped reflection of herself in the mirror was carefully ignored, hair gold (she needed a bath) skin pale (she needed sugar she was going into shock) lips tinted the color of her blood (had she been gnawing on them?) as she made her way over.

His brain was intact, if not his head entirely. One eye claw-gouged bone peeking through flesh foaming blood at the lips foaming blood at the throat.

Bile on her tongue, bitter.

She had to check.

Downwards.

Neck, unbroken, she'd torn not hit, and he'd moved fast enough _almost_ but.

Most of the damage was down.

Lungs, one exposed, the other pierced, struggling and somehow managing to keep drawing air drawing breath and she had watched one of the lowbloods she had culled, part of his chest ripped away by a cat, keep going for _days_ growing thinner and thinner and

and asking her to just _end_ it

stick a fork in him let him be _done_

She had not realized. Hadn't thought. She had thought it was a kindness, even when she couldn't _fix_ them to grant them life, but...

...but...

She hadn't.

But she could give Sollux _something_ more.

This was a _ship_ , sent as a gift (a vial of poison from her Ancestor, toxic, enchanting, like a bottle of witch's oils, dangerous in its beauty) and she knew the helmsblock was open and waiting.

And she had done too much damage to Sollux's body for him to simply do without.

She couldn't _restore_ the destroyed tissues. They would not grow back—the granular blood-filtering organ was one that _did_ regenerate but the capsular blood-waste-filtering organs weren't salvageable and...

...and Sollux would get stuck in a helmsblock _anyway_ if she kept him alive, and left the rest to medicul experts.

She'd not even _thought_ to do that with her culls.

She'd been such a glubbing wriggler and...

She was going to make it up to Sollux, if she could.

And the worst part, the funniest part was she couldn't even remember _why_ she had so suddenly flipped on him, and the looks on almost everybody's faces when she voices that is horrible so she goes back to work wordlessly.

(Gamzee simply smiled, like he understood and maybe he did, maybe he understood better than Eridan who just went “fef” nervously, like he was worried she would _test_ that theory that he'd let her kill him and she don't want to kill _anybody_ except, now, she wondered, maybe, sometimes she ought to?)

His intestines are wound back—mostly intact, not shredded but still cut up, and she recognizes the smell of shit and blood and remembers _that_ troll, too, who had rotted like a zombie, stomach out, before finally managing to slip into death...and she'd figured out—clinically, moonlight-chill still waters—that the reason that little tealblood had died while the oliveblood before whom she'd coiled intestines like rope back inside, sewn up, and last she knew was still alive though jumpy, and she'd felt a bit hurt but she remembered the look in those wide yellow eyes as they watched her work, hands covered in green blood, cheerful, and...

...maybe a smile— _especially_ a seadweller smile, full of predator-sharp fangs—was not what anybody _really_ wanted to see on somebody stuffing their insides back in.

(Elsewhere, the oliveblood dreamed daymares of coming to after being attacked by something to the sight of a strange seadweller cheerfully putting her digestive tubes back inside her, the feel of moirail-gentle hands places hands should never touch, the feel of needle and thread sliding through flesh, and the stories of highbloods with dreams of becoming medicul experts hunting lowbloods, injuring them for the sake of getting practice, and she misses the ordinary horrors of monsters.)

At least she wouldn't have to worry about smiling when-if she did this again, the horrible secret was that if you weren't Terezi with her special nose and skills the scent of blood and ichor and gore was always the same, regardless of the color of a troll's blood. (Though with Sollux she could smell the various _other_ things normally safely contained within tubes, bile and gall and shit and piss...)

She suspected this was the first time Terezi had ever smelled somebody who'd been torn up, her teeth and claws were good and sharp and designed to rend flesh into strips easily, she could ( _did_ ) prepare sashimi with just her claws and it'd been something she'd done casually, without a thought. The blind troll was sticking near a door, as away as possible from the splatter and Feferi didn't blame her. Terezi seemed reluctant to stay, reluctant to leave Karkat even with his moirail keeping him from freaking out too much over the mess she had made and Karkat was just...

...she sighed and told them her plan.

And then interrupted Karkat's incipient rant with the unfortunate truth.

She could keep Sollux alive. He'd not die, not directly from the injuries she had inflicted and she could even keep him from dying indirectly from them, but.

He would suffer from having his body forced to keep working despite wounds that would never heal.

But there was the rig intended for a helmsman—one of the few things in the Alternian empire that would make up for that. This ship was intended to be her flagship. (If she survived to take the throne. She intended to, they all intended for that, even Karkat had begrudgingly admitted that as much as he admired her Ancestor only Feferi offered him a ghost of a chance at his dreams. She knew it was unspoken that they expected to die with her if she failed before, so it would be little change for Sollux.)

It was only, really, a question of how much could be done to keep him alive with the least suffering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Handy references!
> 
> Granular blood-filtering organ=liver.  
> Capsular blood-waste-filtering organs=kidneys.
> 
> Troll anatomy here based off of actually knowing enough about insect anatomy to know to go with something else. Even ignoring the square cube law, the fact they are even superficially human pretty much ensures that the insect-troll theory ought to reduce entomologists to tears. (Choosing insects as a social model does, however, fit what we're told.)


	3. Act 1.3. Witch's Oils

_About, about, in reel and rout_  
 _The death-fires danced at night;_  
 _The water, like a witch's oils,_  
 _Burnt green, and blue and white._  
—Charles Baudelaire

Equius had offered to study what he would need to know to serve the Heiress best when word had come that her gift for her adulthood would be a ship. It was an unspoken test, she was expected to build her own following and either take the throne by force or by convincing her Ancestor that She might safely choose to retire and leave the issue of running the Empire to Her Descendant while She did whatever amused Her without that care resting on Her shoulders.

The ship was a double-edged sword. If she had served in the regular fleet, working her way through if not necessarily up, she would be given ample opportunity to show her skills and win supporters for a coup. But she couldn't turn it down, that would harm her political standing and imply she had no actual desire for the throne and ensure she would never build the supporters for a coup and justify her Ancestor not even bothering with the pretense of considering Her retirement.

She might, though, manage to show herself as a good Descendant who would remember her Ancestor if given the day-to-day leadership over the Empire.

Had the argument been over how to do the one thing needed to finish the ship...? Maybe it had.

She hoped it had been because—watching Equius hook Sollux's mangled body up, _helping_ him, grim humor at the very simple fact that some of the modifications needed to be done to his body could only help him in his current state—it would be better if it had been something _not_ pointless.

Custom said that she ought to name the ship herself, once the helmsman was in place—and she remembered her schoolfeeding well, and could tell when the only thing left was for Sollux to wake and take possession—but this ship was going to be his body (his prison) and she couldn't bring herself to take away his chance to name it.

(And she _had_ tried to tell him earlier that even if the schoolfeeding he got about it was propaganda she had clearance for the accurate material and he _had_ always said he wanted a faster tighter better connection and he...better not laugh Equius was twitchy, more twitchy than even when she chose to go ahead and with deft claws start cutting away flesh she knew from experience would rot away anyway to try to spare as much that might not rot, roughly stitching together flesh elsewhere to just hold it together a little better.)

It was easy to tell when the connections started working, the easing of the struggling rise and fall of Sollux's chest, the slow gentle relaxing of breathing as he finally shifted away from the agonal respiration prolonged only by her unique power to deny Death her due, and it might have been easier if Equius had not tried to reassure her, mistaking the jerks Sollux's body made as a good sign and not of a body trying and failing to cease continuing, and she could relax a little as the fleshworms started sinking themselves in, adjusting, taking over the processes of Sollux's vital organs relieving the stress on his body as psychic power started flowing through.

She nudged Equius away, telling him it was alright, she could finish this, he ought to go treat his wounds—he must have helped pull her off—and she _wanted_ to get Sollux's body situated in the pillar herself. It had been designed to be mostly automated; drugs to keep a psionic under varied in how long they could last, slow constant drip was the only sure way but the life support systems would scrub those out of a helmsman quickly during installation. It had, however, never really been meant to take a helmsman with a ripped-open abdomen and even with her stitches holding him closed, needle and thread borrowed from Kanaya (who might well suck on the leftover bloody thread), Feferi knew she wouldn't be up for packing Sollux's insides back in again so soon.

She really didn't want to ever do that again.

There was a soft noise half clk and half wsh as the installation cycle finished and the tentacles of bioware got Sollux secured into the helm, leaving only the finer details of integration and the wait for him to wake again.

She knew he would, she had not really gone after his head, his brain would be intact.

Lack of oxygen wouldn't be a problem, she knew that her powers would keep tissue from dying from that.

The lights flickered, charcoal-green and white from the circuits and instrument panels, blue from Sollux's open, staring intact eye.

There was nothing really that needed her attention, was there?

She could trust Eridan.

More, at least, than she could trust herself. (She couldn't trust herself at all.)

She could trust Karkat, as well.

There was nothing that meant she had to leave the helmblock until Sollux woke up, and the light was not so dim as to bother her, and she already knew what her nightmares would be of if she slept even in sopor.

She could put off sleeping.

She was sure she could stay away, or at least not sleep deeply enough for it to matter that she was not in sopor, until Sollux woke up.

Feferi curled in on herself, grub position, and watched the witch's oils paint pictures in light on the walls.


	4. Act 1.4. Yet Never a Breeze

_The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;_  
 _Yet never a breeze up blew;_  
 _The mariners all 'gan work the ropes,_  
 _Where they were wont to do:_  
 _They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—_  
 _We were a ghastly crew._  
—Ship's logs, Battleship [Name Pending]

2y2tem boot-up complete.

W)(at?  
Sollux?

ff?  
you...  
don't 2tiink.

O)(!  
38|  
Karcrab poured a BUCK—ET of water over me.

heh. kk would do that.  
ii remember enough two know you mu2t have ended up

GLUB! L—ET'S NOT TALK ABOUT T)(AT. 38(

iit doe2n't matter now?

Y—ES

ff ii'm 2orry ii hadn't meant two  
FUCK

glub  
You're not t)(e one who needs to apologize. I s)(oald.

ii's okay ii gue22.  
ii knew ii wa2 goiing two end up liike thii2 2omeday.  
all 2trong p2iioniic2 do.  
no rea2on for iit two be any diifferent for me.

Sollux...  
I ass)(ore you I wanted you at my side, not )(ere!

2o  
ff  
the 2hiip'2 iinternal chronometer 2ay2 ii've been iin here for half a periigee  
what diid you name thii2 ru2tbucket?

I )(aven't.

2o ii don't have a u2ename?

I wanted you to pick one.

oh.

380 You're BLUS)(ING!

ii never thought that ii wa2 goiing two get two choo2e miine my2elf.

If you ask I'm s)(ore I can )(elp.

you don't have two let me have any 2ay ff

It would make me feel betta.

ff  
ii  
fiine, 2o do you have any iidea2?

Glub glub  
I didn't t)(ink about T)(AT

oh.  
what do we do now?

I was )(OPING you would  
Sea t)(at I didn't  
)(urt anemone like t)(at again

waiit, are you breakiing up wiith me, ff?

glub  
I  
I guess  
I am  
Wit)( —EV—ERYBODY

ii don't under2tand.

I can't take doing T)(AT again  
—EV—ER  
So I'm just going to  
Not have anyfin flus)(ed or caliginous

ff  
are you 2eriou2?

Y—ES  
I can do t)(at  
I s)(all be t)(e glubbing —Empress and I can glubbing well C)(ANG—E t)(ings so I don't )(AV—E to, too

heh  
ii thiink ii liike that iidea

But  
I DO need a moireel  
Badly.

are you askiing me two be your moiiraiil?

Would you?

ii  
ff, iif that'2 what you want  
ye2

I trust you to guide me well. 38)

oh...ii 2ee.  
ff?  
do you like 'cyno2ure'?

...Y—ES, Cynosure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This marks the end of the first act; it will likely be a bit longer than usual before I start posting the next, since I'm going to try to finish each act before I start posting it.
> 
> I wanted to twist a few things in ways other than I normally see them—yet in directions that make perfect canonical sense. Alternia's medical limits seem actually behind where the limits stand on Earth, on the whole; this seems to be mostly a cultural disinterest in putting in time and effort. This also actually says horrible things about the state of the Alternian Empire: you've gotta have administrators if you are actually going to have an empire. They're required if you want to hold anything that is not Absolutely Fucking Empty Space. Absentee landlordism when you expect the tenants to collect your rent & send you it ends pretty much exactly as you'd expect.
> 
> Trolls do not appear to have a very high population, and even if the upper castes live for centuries, the demographics do not work comfortably. If there are any planets being held, it would be outright necessary to keep around anybody capable of manning a desk, even if they can no longer fight...


End file.
